Mobile platforms

Research and development in the field of mobile platforms and software. Android internals, adaptation to hardware, reverse-engineering applications and system software. Creating new applications.

Business software

Selection and development of software for the execution of business processes. CRM-system, computer telephony, VPN-network virtualization. Modules integration with CRM and billing systems, e-commerce solutions. Work on the server infrastructure.

Web solutions

Projects working right in a browser. Development and support of HTML5 websites, e-commerce systems. Optimization for high loads. Writing modules for CMS. Domains registration, web hosting.

Project management

Managing projects on combining the principles of the system approach and Agile philosophy. An explanation why Scrum is good only in words, and Kanban—a supply management system on Toyota plant, and nothing more.

Legacy software

Challenges connected with legacy systems. Modification of existing software by immersing in an outdated technology stack. Data conversion. Migration to a new hardware, moving to a virtual environments.

First meeting

In the first place, try to describe in details your problem and your expectations for its solution. For example, a description of the problem, technical requirements, technology stack as well as other relevant data. Be sure to specify the planned budget. This will give the minimum initial information to identify choices of promising solutions, possibilities of hiring external experts and determining the timing of work.

If you need to perform a small one-time job, to solve a typical problem, get rid of the routine, get results fast and cheap—it is not my profile. Try searching for professionals on freelance exchanges, previously find in your company someone who can clearly define the requirements and will monitor the results. I can help you with this and act both roles of systems analyst and a project manager—this is my profile.

Work process

Solving the problem of a customer is a process relies on combination principles of systematic approach and Agile philosophy, key steps includes:

Application domain research, clarification of the problem.

Elaborating user stories, forming product requirements.

Conducting research to select appropriate engineering solutions.

Continuous integration (development - deployment - feedback).

Continuous Integration process—a replacement for the traditional production, which has the beginning and the end. In today's world there are usually already exist some previous business processes, legacy systems, which should be organized into something new, meet the changing needs, to ensure the integrity of the self-developing systems .

This is a complex job that requires extensive practical experience and knowledge of related disciplines, synergistic component. The simpler and clearer result looks, the more difficult the underlying process. God is in the details.

In-house

In-house is a term signifying close cooperation of external experts with customer’s staff while working on customer's internal projects on its territory. For many projects that do not have detailed technical specification it is the only appropriate way of development. For example, the development of one of our projects required more than 10 iterations (see “Integration module of 1C:Enterprise 8.3 and Billing” in the Portfolio). In-house helped us successfully complete this project. With a fully remote working this would not have happened.

Of course, many projects can and should be conducted from a remote location, by distributed team. However, for tasks that are closely integrated into the infrastructure of the company and its business processes in-house is the only effective approach. Here are few examples.

Migration of the company from 1C:Enterprise 7.7 to 1C:Enterprise 8.3. In short, the specialist who performs migration should not only be well-versed in technical side of things, but also must understand accounting and be oriented in current legislation. This is necessary in order to find a common language with accounting staff for whom the problem is solving. On the technical side migration is a complex and multifaceted process involving both updating vendor software as well as rewriting existing modules and configuration changes for the new platform. On the organisational side migration means understanding of all internal business processes to avoid occurrence of logical errors in the transition process.

Implementation of instant mobile e-mail system, based on BlackBerry infrastructure. The infrastructure builds on top of Windows Server, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry smartphones. BES is a physical server that comes with hardware USB key. Smartphones are devices that require manual binding to BES server. But it is not enough to just give activated smartphones to employees. It is necessary to couch employees. Thus, in-house is the only correct approach to solve this problem.

Meeting the challenges of management and configuring of network routers Cisco, D-Link DES/DGS. The specifics of such problems is that local networks are often not fully linked to Internet, and you can access it only from LAN. Additionally, when configuring switches and routers remotely, any mistake may become critical, and sometimes the only way to resolve misconfiguration is to connect interface cable directly to hardware. Therefore, performing network re-configuration, writing switches backup scripts, monitoring systems, configuring VPN access and updating firmwares should be considered from the standpoint of in-house.

Crisis management for technical department.There are situations when things go wrong and the customer requiring to “restore order” of business processes, software, hardware, and personnel policy.

Couching. The goal of coaching—train customer’s staff to work with new software and, more importantly, explain methods of its effective use and bring understanding employees roles in the company.

Hot-fixing abnormal situations (faults of software and hardware) in an emergency mode. A typical example—a failure of server hard drives, entailing stop of a database server or a billing system. Such problems can be quickly eliminated only with the knowledge of customer’s internal infrastructure and physical access to the equipment.

Latest News

Granny and "Chaos"

2019-09-13

An article about how to travel to conferences so that did not want to go back published in "Hacker" magazine. In Russian language.

Back to My Mac

2019-07-06

Video review about discontinued Apple service Back to My Mac. It was used for remote access to computers and network storages. In Russian language.

Polis

2019-02-23

Photo album "Polis" of city-life black and white photos, printed by independent publisher in Spain, could be purchased in ART Shop.